Tag: freelance writing

This week, I turned one year older. (I’m not going to hide my age from you: 34.)

On my birthday, I was staying in a little house outside Rome, surrounded by olive groves and vineyards growing the red grape Cesanese. My boyfriend and I took a walk in the nearby town, which seemed straight out of an old Sophia Loren film, and where we shopped for veggies and cheeses and a cut of steak to cook for dinner, and then had spritzes in the piazza; after, we went back to the house we were staying in, to drink more spritzes and watch the sunset.

Often, people comment on my social media or in e-mails that my travels “look amazing” or that I’m really “living the dream.” I never quite know what to say in response. Should I deny that Italy is beautiful and I just had some spaghetti alla carbonara to die for at a little neighborhood trattoria in central Rome, or that spring wildflowers have surrounded us everywhere we’ve gone for the past few weeks, and that I spent an entire afternoon observing people and sketching in one of Copenhagen’s new coffee shops Andersen & Maillard because the energy in that space was just so nice? Should I not admit that I’m incredibly excited to return to Australia and taste the wine I made a few months back, and consider when it will be ready for bottling?

Or, should I reply mentioning how much my stomach hurts from the lack of exercise and stress of traveling, that it’s really hard to run a small indie magazine while living on the go, that my entire family had a gathering with all my nieces and nephews there and I kind of wish I’d magically teleported over to give them all hugs, or that on certain days, I would trade this transient existence for whatever their full time jobs are?

Well, this has gotten heavy, quick! This post started out as a way of introducing myself to many of you who have, for whatever reason, started following me in recent weeks. Whomever you are — whether you’re a seasoned magazine editor, a mother of five who enjoys reading, a winemaker, a friend of a friend who followed out of curiosity — I welcome you here very much, because without you I’d be writing into the void.

But I hope you’re not here hoping that I’ll only blog about wine! I do like to write about wine, of course, but sometimes I wish I could be a sort of superhuman Renaissance Woman, writing about wine, literature, modern art, and even politics with expertise and flair. I feel like the world we live in wants us to market one side of ourselves to the world, rather than confessing our multi-faceted natures. Some people manage to escape this monotony, I think — either they jump swiftly and surely from one project to the next, or they gracefully merge their interests into one place. For the latter, I’d note the newsletter from the California wine delivery service “Pour This.” Not being a California resident, I cannot order any of the wines, but I absolutely love the way the company’s founder Ashley Ragovin weaves personal stories and cultural topics into her wine updates. It was an obvious “yes” when she approached me wanting to write for Terre, and if you haven’t yet cracked open your copy of Issue 2, do it now and go straight to Ashley’s story about getting to know Sicilian winemaker Arianna Occhipinti. I love that I can work with such talented and unconventional writers!

But I’m meandering severely. What I wish I could somehow know, is who all of you out there are! Some of my readers, I’ve met and know well. There’s the natural wine fanatic in New York (hello, Andrew, glad you enjoyed Greece!). There’s my mom — and my mom’s lovely ex-boyfriend. There’s the aforementioned editor of an established magazine (you still out there?). Writerly types, I assume, are on the roster. Give me a shout on email sometime, or wherever really, if you feel like it. Let me know if you liked a recent post, if it made you laugh or prompted a question.

Et moi? Well, you already know my age. You may also know that I’m originally from the U.S. but left a year ago, two suitcases in hand, to let the wind carry me. You possibly know that I love wine, only natural wine, made from grapes with no preservatives added. I’m a long-term yoga practitioner, I love modern art, I have seven (or is it eight now?) tattoos. Currently, I am writing this in a hotel room outside Rome, wearing a towel and sitting on the floor. I’m staying up all night because we have an early morning flight and I can’t sleep when I know I have to be at the airport in three hours. I’d rather write.

I’ll have more to say soon, when I’m back in Australia, and I’ve processed the past few weeks. It’s honestly been an incredibly inspiring trip. I’ve learned a lot about myself and my own relationship to natural wine, and I’ve also — sort of unexpectedly — learned a bit about spring pruning, since that’s what people have been busy with in the vineyards we’ve visited. (That’s the vineyard of Le Coste in Italy, up there — one of my favorite natural wine producers.) Vines are really amazing and quirky plants — their instinct is to grow wild, but they have to be tamed to make decent wine. (Metaphor for humans? Hm…) The work of spring pruning involves trimming off the unnecessary shoots that come in all over the branches, and it is a massive job for any small grower to undertake. So much love and care is going into vineyards, all over the Northern Hemisphere right now, as berries begin to flower and turn into actual grapes. Here’s wishing a wonderful growing season to all of you.

And to those of you who have recently joined me here, stay tuned for a new project, which I’ll announce soon. It’s a project for dreamers and risk-takers and those who are fed up with life’s mundane routines, those who thirst for something new, even if they don’t know yet what that is. I’m guessing some of you out there are a bit like that. More to come. I think I’ll tackle a few emails before it’s time to rev up the rental car one more time and do the airport song-and-dance I know so well.

I’ll leave you all with a quote from the Surrealist intellectual Andre Breton:

“I have no desire to know myself. (Basta! I shall always know myself!)”

. . . Um, wow, if this little birthday is this existential, what will 35 be like???